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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grover Cleaveland" data-source="post: 2694905" data-attributes="member: 34932">I wanted to give Erik and James time to read the new topics that Shemmy, BOZ, and others introduced. It seemed common courtesy not to monopolize the thread. When the thread fell into disuse and BOZ was bumping it, it seemed like I could finally give in to temptation.I'll also tell you in advance - eventually I'm going to abruptly stop arguing with you and it'll be forever, since otherwise we're going to be arguing forever. Hopefully, this will be when we at least understand one another's views, even if we don't agree with them. I thought I understood what you were saying before, but then you unleashed the whole "rival lords can't perceive the terrain outside a rival's realm" bombshell, which changes everything. They rule vastly bigger expanses of terrain than deities do, and this has always been the case. Controlling a layer of the Abyss is a bigger deal than controlling a realm in the Abyss. By rigidly giving Orcus no more power than a lesser deity - even in his role as ruler of Thanatos - you've severely nerfed him from his status even in 1st edition.Planescape did give planar lords a substantial boost in power - particularly in Colin McComb's article "The Lords of the Nine" in Dragon #223 - revealing that they can hold their own against even greater deities. This is how it should be. If Demogorgon - the prince of demonkind - can get his tail kicked by Clangaddin or Erythnul, something is severely wrong. The whole cosmology comes into doubt - how has Demogorgon survived more than a few centuries? Why hasn't an intermediate or greater god taken control of his layer? This was objectively broken in 1st edition, fixed in Planescape, and then broken again in 3rd edition. That seems far too convenient, but okay. I don't like your "virtual terrain" premise - an infinite expanse which exists but cannot be entered or perceived - but it makes your argument at least self-consistent. It does mean that you can't object to me making things up out of whole cloth - which I haven't done, but which I now have every right to do.There's no reasonable parallel between refining a gelugon and dretch pregnancies. They're just not remotely similar. Terrible, terrible logic.Figuring out how often tanar'ri reproduce involves a lot more than gestation rates, in any case. We have to figure out how often they're fertile, how long it takes for them to mature, how big their litters are, and what the mortality rate is during the mating and birthing process. You should know this.For what it's worth, I think the answers are:Gestation: About the same as slaadi.Fertility: all the timeMaturity: from birthLitters: VariableMortality: Extremely high. Which is to say, a male and female mate - the male dies. The female gives birth - her young eat their way out of her chest, and she dies. Most of the young are promptly eaten, either by demons, terrain features, or - if she's not dead - the mother. They still reproduce at a frightening rate and it doesn't matter because belief is power, not numbers.I could just as easily plug in other numbers, though, so it might easily take millennia for a demonic population to double through sexual reproduction alone, or there might not be any increase at all.I think mortality rates will be lower with more powerful demons, who have other than bestial intelligence, but I don't think it's reasonable to have demon lords breeding their underlings like cattle. That's not what demons are about. If demons are truly creatures of chaos as much as they're creatures of evil, the sexual reproduction idea works. And that's what it's designed for - the idea that they can reproduce with mortals but not one another is the kind of restriction that makes sense in a lawful culture, which has the ability to control its members forms and the desire to keep them "pure," but not in a chaotic one where tanar'ri mutate and evolve on their own.That's true, but demons are creatures of rebellion, and demons have no laws, only whims. They're an unruly bunch, and the majority of them are going to do as they please regardless of their threats. It's like hiring a guy to herd cats, and then punishing him because the cats don't herd properly. If Prince X is going to be that unreasonable, Balor Z might get skinned alive regardless of what he does and might well leave X-Land and become a free agent somewhere else.  In most cases, princes will deal with their balors directly rather than going through a succession of feudal intermediaries. It's part of what I'm saying about a more chaotic approach.That's not to say that Graz'zt has no control over his minions at all - that's not what I'm trying to say at all. He can herd them in a general direction and expect them to more or less go there. He can expect them to cause a lot of chaos and destruction once they get where they're going, too - that's what they are. He can't expect them to run a nursery without eating the babies - it's like getting foxes to run a henhouse. That's not what demons are good for.Demon hordes are most efficient when their leaders give their minions free reign to interpret their orders as they desire. That's Chaos' strength. Trying to control them too rigidly is like trying to open a can of peas with a hammer - it's the wrong tool for the job.Good lord, that's a lot of similes. All of the Abyss is overtly hazardous to them. It's more hazardous to mortals, but it's hazardous for everyone.Of course they do, and there is. That's not to say it's constant internecine warfare everywhere, but you can't assume that any place is "safe."Even if there wasn't precedent for the idea of demons butchering one another - and there is - you can't say anything as long as you stand by your "layers that are there but not there" argument, or for that matter your whole "Abyssal princes only rule finite realms" argument, both of which are without precedent in published material.I have a fairly large occult library and access to several larger ones. One thing I've noticed is that occultists like to give things krazy spellings for no particular reason, like Aleister Crowley insisting on spelling "magic" with a K. Spelling "cosmos" with K makes it look more Greek, but does it really change its meaning?</blockquote>

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